Valve acquires Firewatch developer Campo Santo

Valve has acquired Campo Santo, developer of the award-winning 2016 game Firewatch.

In a post on Campo Santo’s blog, the company said: “The twelve of us at Campo Santo have agreed to join Valve, where we will maintain our jobs as video game developers and continue production on our current project, In the Valley of Gods. In Valve we found a group of folks who, to their core, feel the same way about the work that they do (this, you may be surprised to learn, doesn’t happen every day). In us, they found a group with unique experience and valuable, diverse perspectives. It quickly became an obvious match.”

The Campo Santo team will move en masse to Valve’s headquarters in Bellevue, Washington. The Valve acquisition marks a stellar rise for Campo Santo, which was only formed in 2013; Firewatch was its first game, and won the 2017 Best Debut Game BAFTA and the 2016 Golden Joystick for Best Indie Game.

Neither Valve nor Campo Santo revealed any details of any of the deal’s financial aspects. In the Valley of the Gods is due to be released in 2019.

Steve Boxer has been writing about videogames since the early 1990s. His first console was an Atari VCS, and he misspent most of his youth in the 1980s in the arcades. As well as for Green Man Gaming, he can be found writing for The Guardian, Empire, TechRadar and Pocket-Lint. He’s currently having trouble deciding whether his favourite console is his Xbox One X or his Switch, and plays a wide range of games, but especially RPGs (he loves a good JRPG) action-adventure titles, shooters of all descriptions and driving games. Follow him here.